- Title Information
- Title
- Where Movement Meets Practice: Defining the Edges of the Housing Cooperative in the Capitalist Market.
- Abstract
- I begin with the premise that our current housing market is one in crisis, in which Americans are faced with a rigid binary-- buy or rent-- that fundamentally does not meet their needs. In this climate, it is imperative that we take alternatives seriously, not as peripheral, idealistic or without the potential for scale. The housing co-op is one such alternative. Much of the existing literature on housing co-ops address the internal, social or community dynamics of the model. I have taken those aspects as a given-- yes, the co-op offers something unique to its residents, but how does it fit within the wider market, the landscape of a city?
My guiding question is externally oriented them, addressing the edges of the co-op. By “edges” I mean those places where the co-op model rubs up against the rigid definitions and processes of the capitalist market. Many co-ops, as they exist today, have messy interactions with outside institutions, such as government regulations, real estate laws, and financing systems. There is not sufficient infrastructure in place to help co-ops navigate relationships with such institutions.
If the co-op model is to gain serious traction in this country, it must be brought into a durable relationship with capitalism, so that legal, financial and political systems see it as a regular entity, and therefore feel comfortable in lending or supporting it. But to many co-ops, a durable relationship with capitalism sounds like the antithesis to their community mission. The question then is: how do you have a consistent, responsible party (the co-op) that both meets the demands of capitalism (including banks, lawyers, regulators, and politicians) and keeps the life cycle of the co-op sufficiently interpersonal and democratic? And why might this be a much-needed presence in our housing binary—what’s at stake here?
I study these questions with two case studies in Providence, Rhode Island-- Good News Housing and Community Land Trust, and the Watermyn Co-op, part of the Brown Association for Cooperative Housing. I tease apart the ways in which these entities are mismatched with the outside world in terms of both regulation and culture, and envision a world in which these mismatches might be resolved.
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Gosselin, Nora
- Role
- Role Term (marcrelator)
(authorityURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators", valueURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/cre")
- creator
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Zipp, Samuel
- Role
- Role Term (marcrelator)
(authorityURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators", valueURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/ths")
- thesis advisor
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Bull, Marijoan
- Role
- Role Term
- reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. Urban Studies
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2019
- Type of Resource
- text
- Physical Description
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Language
- Language Term:
Text (ISO639-2B)
(authorityURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-2.html", valueURI="http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-2/eng")
- English
- Note:
thesis
- Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2019
- Note
(displayLabel="Concentration")
- Urban Studies, English
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00962245")
- Topic
- Housing
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/")
- Topic
- Cooperative
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01204977")
- Topic
- Rhode Island--Providence
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.26300/bcb6-kk17
- Access Condition:
rights statement
(href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
- In Copyright
- Access Condition:
restriction on access
- Collection is open for research.